Career so far

25 years making fast, stable & delightful software. Focused on platforms and tools for creating things (even other tools).

Design is my well-worn hat, but I have technical and product ones, too. Player-coach. Stem cell. Biased toward fast, small, functionally-diverse teams that deliver great service.

8⅙ yearsWas partner at ZURB (8⅙ years). Designed new product for Palantir, Facebook, Photobucket, and 200 other companies. Incubated our own startup. Rippled the pond with Foundation.

Worked briefly at a startup where we partnered with Apple on early TV apps, and learned what it's like when financing falls apart.

2⅓ yearsLed design and then product at Zazzle (2⅓ years), another Z-named company with awesome on-demand manufacturing tech and creative tools under the hood. Invented, rebranded, saved Christmas once.

Early adopter of a tool called Grammarly.

1⅝ yearsFounding product designer at Coda (1⅝ years) where we gave everyone a familiar docs-and-spreadsheets interface for creating custom applications. Made lifelong friends. Earned a patent.

Very early adopter of a tool called Figma. (37:40)

3⅝ yearsHead of design & research at Looker (3⅝ years), chasing the same vision as Coda but from the data side. Small wins, big wins. Made lifelong friends. Bittersweet acquisition by Google.

the pandemicCo-founded and bootstrapped Jump (pandemic years), to let people write software in plain English and point-and-click. Pre-LLM. Tech worked, timing didn't…

2½ yearsHead of design at Turnstile (2½ years), an end-to-end revenue platform. Price any way you want. Tame the chaos.

nowBuilding Rel at RelationalAI with a small, high-trust team. The old dream in a new form: giving people and agents better shared context for how a business actually works.

I've never had this much fun building.